Another look at the Nook

When the Barnes & Noble Nook was first announced, I was intrigued. If it was as good as it seemed to be, I was actually planning to get one. It seemed to be an incremental improvement to the Kindle.

A couple of things bothered me from the start though.

One was that the screen refresh speed (how long it takes to turn a page) seemed awfully slow in the one hands-on, non-Kate video I could find. eInk itself is not the speediest of displays as it is. The Kindle itself is kind of just on the edge of annoyance. You learn to press the page turn button in on the second to last line of the page, and hold it there til you are into the last line and release it part way in, giving you time to read the last half of the line and shift your eyes upwards just in time. Sounds silly, but you can get into a good rhythm that keeps it out of the annoying range. The Nook’s refresh speed looked seriously slower. Enough to just make it that little grain of sand that irritates you every time you turn a page. You might not notice it if it was your first ebook reader, but if coming from a Kindle, I would imagine it would get on your nerves. Anyway, this was just an impression from a little video, but I wanted to see it in person, or read some hands-on reviews that mentioned how the screen update was. This brings me to the second concern…

Other than the official promo video (“I’m Kate, and this is my Nook…”), the video mentioned above was the only other one I could find of the Nook in action. Furthermore, there were absolutely NO reports of non-B&N people who had actually laid their hands on one. In fact, various reports of people who went to various events where the Nook was featured said that NOBODY outside of B&N was allowed to touch one. There was no hands-on. This was a red flag. All I could think is that they are hiding something. Something not good. Now of course, it’s natural to want to hold off on early builds of any hardware or software until it’s ready for the public eye. But as time went on and we got closer and closer to the release date, there was not a single report of anyone in the real world who had touched a working model. And I looked regularly. They were being sold as prerelease items, and sold out at that, with nobody but Kate & company telling us how awesome they were. This just screamed, “NOT READY” to me.

Finally, on December 9, B&N released some of their babies into the wild. Both David Pogue and Walt Mossberg panned it. Both reported it being slow, and both reported crashes and bugs. About what I expected, actually.

So beyond that, what about the advantages the Nook has over the Kindle. After all, there was something that made me want it originally. Well, here are the points I wrote about back in October, when I was still kind of excited about it:

• Additional storage through a micro SD slot. Still not sure why this is cool. You can fit 1500 books on the Kindle. Don’t think I’ll outgrow that any time soon.
• Removable battery. As I said, “battery life probably outlasts how long you own any one device before upgrading to the next big thing.” Not a selling point.
• Wifi as well as 3G. Sounds cool, but reports say this feature is not implemented very well. No indication of hotspots, and no way to log in to a connection if you need to.
• Exclusive content only available on the free B&N wifi. (discounts, etc.) OK… not going to make me buy.
• You will be able to read entire books via in-store wifi without buying them. It turns out that you can do one hour of reading per book, per 24 hours. And I’m not at all sure that’s that’s their entire catalog.
• Personalized screensavers. This is nice, but not a killer feature. Not sure why the Kindle doesn’t allow this. I finally installed the screensaver hack on my Kindle, and it’s nice to have custom images there. But hasn’t changed my life or anything.
• Native PDF support. Amazon beat them to the punch here by adding that to the Kindle 2 just before the Nook was released.
• Color touch screen display. What I originally said: “Gimmicky perhaps, but seriously, anything has to be better than the e-ink/joybutton navigation on the Kindle. Well, who knows. Maybe they screwed it up royally and made something worse, but you have to hope.” From the reports I’ve read, it appears they may have actually screwed it up royally.
• The whole lending thing. This also pretty gimmicky. And it turns out that you can lend a book exactly one time, for a period of 14 days, during which time, you may not read the book yourself. meh. Oh, and books can only be shared if the publisher allows them to be shared.

Additionally, while they are still touting “over one million titles”, the majority of these are old and largely unknown works in the public domain, from Google. The kind of stuff you can get on Gutenberg. So those are really available for the Kindle as well. Most reviews now say that the actual selection on the Kindle is much better than what you can get on the Nook.

So overall, the advantages are luke warm, and the deficiencies are significant.

As for my own hands on, I frequently visit a few different Barnes & Nobles and was finally able to get my hands on one a week or so ago. Right off the bat, I did find the navigation a bit confusing. Not the greatest UI. But I found a book and figured out how to open it. It took noticeably longer than my Kindle takes to open a book. Again, the Kindle is no speed freak, so this was pretty long. When it finally opened, I get an error message saying something about it being “unable to load a program”. Totally not user friendly. What program? Why? What does this mean for me? Can I read my book now? Should I return my Nook for service? Reboot? No idea. Eventually I just dismissed the dialog and was able to read the book just fine. Page turns were slower. Probably just over that annoyance threshold.

I should note that I’ve had my Kindle for 9 months now, and have never once experienced a crash, freeze, any error of any kind, or in any way had it not do exactly what I expected to do. This is with significant, usually daily use. So the fact that I had an error the first time I laid hand on a Nook is bad news.

At another store, I was just walking by the Nook display where an employee was showing off a Nook and heard her, frustratedly say, “hmmm… not sure why it’s doing that. All I can say is that this unit has been used a lot today.” Another crash? Sounded like it.

Another, humorous incident when I was walking by a display, the salesperson describing the Nook to a couple was clearly struggling. “… well, the display… it’s um… well, it’s like reading a book. Yeah, soo… that’s what it’s like. It’s … it’s like reading a book. So… um… yeah…” Another customer asked here the differences between a Kindle and Nook and she went on and on about the replaceable battery. Finally the customer acknowledged that one and asked what other differences. She finally admitted that was the only difference she knew of. Of course that doesn’t really say anything about the device itself, just found it funny.

Anyway, I’m not trying to bash the Nook. I’m actually kind of disappointed. Like I said, I was ready to buy one if it lived up to its claims. It just doesn’t yet. On a positive note, though, it seems like most of the issues with the Nook are quite obviously software-based, rather than hardware. This means that as updates get pushed out, bugs could go away and performance could improve. Already, I understand that a patch was pushed out that improved performance. A few more of those and the Nook could be a contender. However, at this point, I think even a perfect Nook wouldn’t make me switch from my Kindle.

But at any rate, I’m glad the Nook is here. Amazon needed some real competition. I’m very much looking forward to what both companies come up with for their next versions.